ZEDEDA’s Open Orchestration Solution for the Distributed Edge
Today marks an important milestone in ZEDEDA’s history, and the evolution of the edge computing — the general availability of the industry’s first open orchestration solution for the distributed edge, which has been deployed for over a year in manufacturing, oil and gas, energy, and retail, in partnership with large, global enterprises including Rockwell Automation, Invenergy, BOBST, PeopleFlo, and Agora.
Together with our customers, partners and the open source community, the ZEDEDA team has tackled great challenges, and driven forward an open orchestration solution designed with the flexibility, security and simplicity required to truly operationalize distributed edge implementations at scale.
The explosion of edge data requires more processing at the network edge for reasons of bandwidth costs, latency, autonomy, security and privacy. Existing solutions do not meet the unique needs for orchestrating apps and hardware deployed at the distributed edge due to the diverse mix of technologies, required domain expertise and lack of standardized infrastructure outside of physically-secure data centers.
Digital transformation with technologies such as IoT and AI is hard. Regarding IoT specifically, a proliferation of proprietary platforms over the past several years has created fragmentation , that introduces complexity and risk, often leading to failed projects. As the need for edge computing has become more and more clear to enable use cases in IoT, AI, AR/VR, 5G, network virtualization and security, inventors have been investing in edge technology to build solutions that improve factory yields, monitor power grids remotely, protect workers on oil rigs, optimize retail inventory levels, and more. However, a common pattern is that once an initial pilot is completed, the need for a flexible edge orchestration solution that supports a mix of technologies and skill sets becomes abundantly clear.
The market has learned a lot of lessons, but not until after billions of dollars were poured into hundreds of companies building proprietary software platforms, creating thousands of disparate edge devices, and establishing hundreds of diverse network protocols that generally resulted in increased complexity, inefficiency and “unintended consequences”, including budget overruns and failure to deliver a clear ROI.
Today is a new day, and while the ZEDEDA team is celebrating this milestone for our company, the kudos is distributed across the many creative developers, engineers, product line managers, visionaries, and partners that we have had the honor to work with in the real world. Building proven connected edge systems that remove constraints, eliminate operational nightmares and insure against vendor lock-in requires collaboration and we thank the community for their support. Together we have moved from the loud cacophony of disparate, non-integrated edge architectures to symphonic solutions orchestrated to deliver bottom line improvements while supporting topline growth through innovation and automation.
You can read about the experience of our customers and partners in our press release, but at a high level here is what our extended team built together, despite the challenges we all faced in 2020:
- A cloud-based remote orchestration solution offering full-stack remote management and observability for any distributed edge computing hardware
- The open source EVE-OS, built through community collaboration within Project EVE in the Linux Foundation’s LF Edge organization. EVE-OS is a flexible, universal Linux-based operating system that insures against vendor lock-in and facilitates interoperability across an open ecosystem. The ZEDEDA orchestration cloud leverages the open APIs in EVE-OS which is deployed on edge compute nodes.
- A state of the art Zero Trust security architecture that protects critical assets and processes as organizations bridge their OT and IT networks
- Concurrent support for any combination of virtual machines, Docker containers and Kubernetes clusters on distributed edge hardware, deployed on choice of any hardware and with any on-prem or cloud backend
- An Open Edge Ecosystem with choice of hardware and applications that optimizes edge data collection, management and analytics as the fuel for connected solutions.
ZEDEDA simplifies distributed edge operations by enabling customers to deploy and manage compute nodes in the field with no IT expertise required on site; this is a huge step forward for enterprises that have a mix of OT and IT skill sets in the field. This zero touch approach enables both deployment scale and supports the rapid shift to remote working, as set-up, monitoring and maintenance is made possible through digital automation and remote orchestration.
The ZEDEDA customer and partner community is jointly developing an awesome, built-in app marketplace for on-demand deployment of custom innovations and featured offerings from leading ISVs. By activating functions such as data ingestion, AI/ML, networking and security, customers can instantly unlock the value of data to make real-time decisions, maximize operational efficiency and drive new business outcomes. This enables them to bridge their physical field operations to the digital world, leading to highly efficient processes and business reporting and insights that enrich experiences and contribute to more profitable business outcomes.
A zero trust cybersecurity model also sets our solution apart. Rooted in hardware-based root of trust, features include a crypto-based ID that eliminates local device username/password, measured boot, data encryption both in motion and at rest, physical I/O blocking to prevent tampering in the field and distributed firewall to route network traffic based on policy. As Gartner Research Vice President Bob Gill writes in Gartner’s 2021 Strategic Roadmap for Edge Computing: “One thing that stands out when developing a POC for an edge implementation is that creating a single system for a trial can be straightforward, but implementing such a system at scale, including enterprise-grade security, orchestration, life cycle management and governance, is a daunting task.”
Our solution is sold and consumed as a service with a subscription-based enterprise license, including 24/7 support. The “pay-as-you-go” model has been enthusiastically embraced by our customers who can now start small and scale, and only pay for what they need as they evolve their connected edge operations. Support for legacy applications through virtual machines provides customers with a transition path from existing investments to modern cloud-native innovations at the edge.
Last but not least, white-label models are available for OEMs and SIs, giving them an “instant distributed edge orchestration solution” that they can embed in their own offers, accelerating time to market and reducing development costs as they “SaaSify” their business model. Our customer BOBST is a great example of this as working together, we were able to get from prototype to production in two months, shaving six months off the timeline they projected to enable their edge device orchestration needs.
We will be sharing more about this and future features in the coming weeks and months. For now, we welcome you to learn more about the ZEDEDA’s product and to engage with both our company directly and within Project EVE in LF Edge so we can learn what your goals are and how we can help, and collaborate on an open foundation that further accelerates the market potential. We can welcome you to our world, where we’re bringing the cloud down to earth to enable massive value at the edge.
Ready to learn more? Register here to join us on February 10 at 10 am PT for a live webinar that will include customer use cases and a product demonstration.
